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1/ Story time: in 2013 I co-founded a media company with Jon Stewart from the Daily Show and Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) from Game of Thrones.
However, they didn’t know they were co-founders.
A thread.
However, they didn’t know they were co-founders.
A thread.
2/ On March 25th, 2013, I went to the studio taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in NYC. Peter Dinklage, the Emmy Award Winning Actor, who plays Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones, was the guest.
3/ At one point during the show, Jon Stewart described the look people get on their faces when they binge watch Game of Thrones. Immediately, Peter Dinklage said ‘Nerd Glaze’.
4/ What Jon Stewart said next was an entrepreneur’s dream. Watch for yourself.
5/ Being a bit slow, I didn’t have the ‘aha’ moment until sitting at dinner after the show. The holy shit moment was realizing that Jon Stewart just said “if someone doesn’t have http://nerdglaze.com right now, you have to register that”, and the show HAD YET TO AIR.
6/ It was 7:27pm. The show was set to air at 11pm. I opened up http://Hover.com on my phone and bought http://nerdglaze.com .
7/ I rushed home and set up a landing page with a photo of Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones, an open field for people to add their email, and a clickbait header saying ‘big things coming’, although I had literally no plans at this point.
8/ I set up a Google Analytics account, made some popcorn, and watched as traffic spiked as The Daily Show aired across the US. It’s hard to imagine how many aspiring entrepreneurs I disappointed by already having a landing page setup.
9/ Of all the things in this story, this is one of the best. As the show went live, a reddit post emerged talking about the fact the domain was already registered and was asking for emails.
I’ll shortly be updating my twitter bio to Tech Savvy GoT Fan.
I’ll shortly be updating my twitter bio to Tech Savvy GoT Fan.
10/ By the end of the night, I had hundreds of thousands of clicks, about 50k emails, and literally no idea what to do with this.
11/ In the days and weeks that followed, I got a couple friends involved, like @MattBranigan . As nerds ourselves, we decided to turn http://nerdglaze.com into a site that we always wanted, a sort of CNN for all fandoms of the nerd world. We had movies, books, anime, etc.
12/ We posted on the site, and sent an email to our subscriber list asking if anyone that could help with design, engineering, writing, editing, community-building, et. wanted to join the project.
13/ Overnight, we had 1000s of emails offering to help build nerdglaze. It was exciting and daunting. I had no idea how to process them. To this day, some of the best emails I’ve ever received were from this community.
14/ It turns out that when you strike a nerve, people are willing to do anything for a mission they believe in. Here are a couple excerpts from emails we reviewed back then. If you are a nerd like me, these will be some of the greatest resumes you will ever see.
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17/ Within a week, we went live. The community helped build everything, from the Wordpress site, to the design, to a 20+ person editorial team, and more. It was amazing to see. And everyone did it for free because they believed in a place on the internet that was theirs.
18/ Here is an early design mockup by a community member that ended up looking very similar to what we launched with. I wish I had taken more screenshots of the site over the years.
19/ The site continued to grow, and I remember little milestones like crossing 1000 uniques/day. I shot my friend Matt this email on August 8th, 2013. I know this is literally peanuts for internet traffic, BUT IT FELT SPECIAL TO US!!
20/ From time to time, one of our articles would get posted to @reddit, like this one, and our site would crash from the traffic. Although this was a trivial engineering issue, I now have mad respect for anyone who deals with crashes day and night
21/ In the middle of 2014, and while I was trying to do this and get @susaventures off the ground, we decided it was time to find someone else to run it. We found another blog owner in the midwest, and agreed on a small acquisition of sorts to have them take over operations.
22/ Although the blog slowly fizzled out under their control, as it lacked the love and attention it needed, it was one of the most fun years of my life, and an experience I cherish.
23/ WARNING: going to get cheesy for second so leave if you want. If you think entrepreneurship is easy, just try starting something. Despite this being a relatively small project compared to many startups today, it took so much time, energy and love.
24/ My other big learning: you don’t need to create a huge company to have a real impact on the world. Every person that came to nerdglaze over that year, came to indulge in topics they loved, which in small way, brightened their days.
25/ I salute the side hustles, passion projects, and small, intimate communities people build online, and offline. After all, belonging is all anyone wants.
26/ While I sometimes wish I ran the largest nerd-focused website on the internet, @susaventures has been a blast to build, and my appreciation for the 0-1 phase of a startup, and for the power of a community, was solidified in my mind forever.
